6 01732 759725 BT report highlights benefits of sovereign AI As concern about over-reliance on nonsovereign digital platforms intensifies, a new study suggests that giving organisations greater certainty over where and how data is stored, accessed and governed could alleviate the security worries limiting AI adoption in the UK and give the economy an £18bn productivity boost. Publication of The UK’s Digital Sovereign Opportunity by Assembly Research and BT follows the commercial launch of BT’s end-to-end sovereign portfolio of connectivity, voice, cloud and AI solutions. As part of the portfolio, BT is building sovereign AI capability with Nscale and NVIDIA that will enable organisations to run AI workloads domestically, scale capacity on demand and meet data residency, security and regulatory requirements. In the report, Assembly Research claims that by giving businesses the confidence to scale AI securely, digital sovereignty could accelerate investment in UK-based data centres to the tune of £14.6bn by 2030 and power an estimated £13.6bn of additional revenue from sovereign cloud services. BT is also launching Sovereign Cloud, a private cloud platform hosted and operated entirely within the UK. Designed for organisations handling sensitive or regulated workloads, it provides compute, storage and backup capabilities underpinned by Rackspace Technology’s UK data centre infrastructure, with UK-based, securitycleared teams and managed services to support migration, operations and ongoing compliance. Jon James, CEO of BT Business, said: “Organisations, public and private, want to move fast with AI and cloud while keeping control over the sovereignty of their data. That’s why BT is the first UK provider to offer a complete sovereign portfolio, from secure connectivity and voice to sovereign cloud and AI, all delivered in one place.” bt.com ...continued NEWS continued... CWCS quadruples cloud and colocation capacity CWCS Managed Hosting has quadrupled its cloud and colocation capacity with the opening of a new data centre in Nottingham that provides secure rack space, high power availability and direct access to on-site engineers. Designed to support more than 200 racks at full capacity, the state-of-the-art, Tier-3-aligned facility in Beeston is built to accommodate a wide range of enterprise workloads, including high-density servers, GPU servers and AI workloads. CWCS Managing Director Karl Mendez said: “Opening a new data centre in Nottingham significantly increases our capacity to offer flexible options comprising cloud hosting, dedicated server hosting and colocation services. Above all, it ensures we can continue to meet the individual needs of our customers and positions us as a trusted partner for mission-critical data hosting.” Mendez adds that CWCS is seeing a big increase in demand for colocation from organisations that want more control and lower cloud costs. In line with CWCS’s commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030, the facility is powered entirely by renewable energy supplemented by on-site solar panels. With free cooling and hot-aisle containment, it has a target Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.15, compared to a UK industry average of around 1.5. Mendez said: “We are committed to becoming a leader in secure, low-emission hosting, and our new Nottingham site is a big step towards that. Designing to a target PUE of 1.15 is something the team should be genuinely proud of. If we hit that figure, it would place us among the most efficient data centres in the country.” CWCS also has facilities in London and Manchester. www.cwcs.co.uk Turning the UK into an AI maker not taker Locai Labs, the UK’s sovereign AI company, and Civo, the British sovereign cloud provider, have joined forces to create the UK’s first pretrained, sovereign large language models (LLMs). Dubbed Project Mercury, the programme brings together Locai Labs’ advanced Mercury model development capabilities and Civo’s UK sovereign cloud infrastructure to create a homegrown frontier-level AI ecosystem that ensures sensitive British data and AI usage stay strictly under British jurisdiction. Mark Boost, Founder and CEO of Civo, hopes the initiative will free the UK from reliance on hyperscale cloud providers and overseas-controlled data centres and AI models. He said: “This partnership proves the UK can develop, train and host sovereign LLMs entirely on home soil, showing what two UK founded companies can deliver for the security and trust of other UK based enterprises.” Available from the UK-resident Civo Sovereign Cloud or deployed and hosted on-premises within an enterprise’s own IT infrastructure, Mercury series LLMs are built and trained entirely in the UK and engineered to meet the stringent security, residency and compliance requirements of public and private sector customers. The series, developed using 100% renewable energy, will feature Edge Intelligence models designed for local, low-latency applications and Frontier Power models capable of handling the most complex generative AI tasks. www.civo.com Mark Boost Karl Mendez
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